All cooks know that to cook you need a cooking vessel: a pot, a pan, a skillet, a wok, a boiler, something to cook the food in. As almost any American culinary person will attest, whether a professional chef or the casual, once-a-year at-home cook, pots, pans, and skillets are basic utensils. While pots, pans and skillets may have different shapes, sizes, handles, lids and materials they are required for almost all food preparation.
For all of the different pots, pans and skillets that are available and their wide range of prices, pots, pans and skillets generally share a common trait; namely, each is capable of cooking or heating only one type of food at a time. This limitation is not true of ovens. Ovens can cook multiple types of food at once. Similarly, plates can serve more than one type of food at a time. The inefficiency of pots, pans and skillets causes cooks to use multiple cooking vessels to bake a cake, to prepare a meal, or to reheat leftovers. This inefficiency results in greater energy use, more effort, increased clean up time, and higher costs when purchasing cooking vessels.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a means by which multiple foods can be cooked, fried, or heated, in a single cooking vessel without unwanted cross-contamination of the various foods. Beneficially such a cooking vessel would have multiple cooking compartments that allow multiple foods to be cooked at the same time. Preferably such a cooking vessel would save time, reduce cooking mess, enable easier clean-up and reduce costs. In practice such cooking vessels would avoid unwanted cross contamination of foods while enabling easy separation of oil, grease and fat, thus enabling healthier eating. Ideally such cooking vessels would either reduce the chance of spill over or would be configured to allow drippings from one food to drain into another section.